When the film “Wonder Woman” was released,
the comedienne Michelle Wolf said that a small part of
her hoped the movie would be a flop. Appearing on “The Daily Show,”
she claimed it wasn’t fair to pin all the hopes of the female
gender on one film as the embodiment of equality.

On the contrary, she said: “You know when
we’ll feel women are equal at the box office? When we get to make a
bad superhero movie and then immediately make another bad one…. No
one left crappy ‘Batman v Superman’ saying, ‘Well, I guess we’re
done making ‘man movies.’”

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unlike wonder Woman DC its still not a marvel at the box office …
or like the way Guys went to see Captain America
So Dear Ladies ! Find a Cinema !

maybe they should have named it Ms Marvel

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Gird your loins, America, for I have a bone-rattlingly powerful
tale to tell: In case you haven’t heard, there is a new movie in
theaters, and it will reportedly change the way you look at the
world forever. It is called “Captain Marvel,” and it is based on a
comic book superhero, and the superhero is played by … here, you
might grab your smelling salts, because this is super
groundbreaking and wildly controversial in the year 2019 … A
WOMAN.

Whoa! I know! It’s mind-boggling! This has never happened
before, except when it happened two years ago, when “Wonder Woman”
came out, which was also when an impressively large press cohort
collectively and conveniently forgot the countless strong female
leads that had occurred even before then! Remember those fevered
days? Remember when an alarming number of movie critics
simultaneously lost their minds over the sheer raw feminism of
“Wonder Woman,” documenting how they cried at the
theater and declaring that viewing “Wonder Woman” might have
been the most powerful experience of their life, which should
deeply worry us all if that is indeed really true?

It’s OK if you don’t remember: The internet appears to be
melting all of our brains. Anyway, I liked “Wonder Woman,” and I’m
sure “Captain Marvel” is fine, despite the web of semi-hysterical
press surrounding its release. The women in the film, intones one
review at Forbes, “are pilots, they are scientists, they are
warriors, and while some of the men around them might not
understand that or accept it, the women don’t frankly need them to
and aren’t going to wait around for the myopic men to catch up to
the facts.”

Ah, yes! Those daft, myopic men, always fouling things up! But
wait, there’s more: “That’s not to say, however, that ‘Captain
Marvel’ doesn’t remind us of the sorts of daily frustrations,
struggles, and inequalities women face in society — being told to
smile more …”

Wait. What? Let’s stop here, shall we? Out of the world’s
massive crab bucket of problems, let us stop and consider the
modern scourge among American women of being told to smile more.
Has it been two seconds? OK, that’s probably enough time — although
if you google “Captain Marvel” and “smile more,” you will discover
that many people fervently disagree.

With that in mind, here’s what does worry me a bit, even if it
is a bit tangential: “Captain Marvel,” or at least the reception to
it, might be a subtle indicator of how suffocating modern feminism
has become.

At a base level, the very idea of a superhero is innately goofy
or farcical, or at least it should be. But “Captain Marvel,” by
most accounts, is almost perfect: Strong. Beautiful. Driven.
Ultra-powerful. According to Slate, she is a “serious, stolid type
whose steel will and laser-focused commitment to her mission make
her a formidable foe even when her fists aren’t glowing orange with
photon-blasting superpowers,” which is impressive indeed.

But what does it say about our culture that influential people
take a movie like this — and similar so-called representations of
women, which, as a reminder, are based on fictional comic book
characters with alien superpowers — so seriously? Perhaps it’s
because modern feminism has morphed into a crazed culture of
unforgiving, humorless and ultimately atomized workaholism. But
hey, that’s just my theory.

On Feb. 24, The Atlantic published a fascinating essay by Derek
Thompson on the rise of American “workism,” which he describes as a
“kind of religion” that promises “identity, transcendence and
community” by centering one’s life around work. While traditional
religious faith has declined in America, Thompson notes, “everybody
worships something. And workism is among the most potent of the new
religions competing for congregants.” Morph workism with feminism
and boy, oh boy, you’ve got something to behold.

I have a fairly old-school view when it comes to female
empowerment: Women should be free to pursue their dreams, whether
that involves being an astronaut or an accountant or a farmer or a
stay-at-home mom. I’ve also been around long enough to see that
American culture relentlessly pushes high-achieving young women to
obsessively put their careers first in their lives, no matter what
their ultimate personal goals might be — even if those goals
involve having a family.

Wolf’s crack two years ago again became more relevant with the
release of “Captain Marvel” this month. Quite a few characters have
tried on the superhero suit created about 50 years ago by Stan
Lee. Captain Marvel started off as a man (who was accused of too
closely resembling the competition – Superman). The character went
through several iterations before becoming Carol Danvers.

The brave and determined test pilot became
Captain Marvel in a relatively new series of comics dating from
2012, and now she’s starring in a new movie — not just any movie,
but the first in the Marvel Studios universe to focus on a
superheroine without a superhero sidekick.

To understand the heroine and the movie that
bears her name, it’s essential to consider the universe she was
born into. Marvel Studios’ movies, which are all set in the same
fictional world, are rapidly approaching a major turning point.
“Captain Marvel” is only a way station a larger plan by the
studio’s president, Kevin Feige, who approaches movies like he’s
playing chess. Each move contains the seeds of the next ten. A year
after the great drama of “Avengers: Infinity War,” Carol Danvers
provides major support for the universe, with a view to next
month’s release of “Avengers: Endgame.”

Consistent with Marvel
Studios’ zealous maintenance of the internal logic and
uniformity of films, the Captain’s story was written with an eye to
not disrupting the time line. The story goes back to 1995 — to
avoid contradictions with the world of “Iron Man,” which was
launched in 2008.

A scene from “Captain Marvel,” a film is too much an echo
of movies from the past.Chuck
Zlotnick / Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

That being the case, the picture has a
double aim — providing the story of Carol Danvers’ origin and at
the same time giving her discharge papers for “The Avengers.” In an
effort to add a twist to the original story – the Achilles’ heel of
every new superhero – the plot jumps backwards and forwards in
time.

Crashing to Earth

Brie Larson is Danvers, a soldier in the
army of the Kree nation of aliens. She has no memory of her past,
but receives guidance from an entity known as the Supreme
Intelligence, embodied by Annette Bening, and also undergoes combat
training with Yon-Rogg (Jude Law). Major complications set in as a
result of a war with other aliens, the Skrulls. She therefore finds
herself on blue planet C-53, known to its inhabitants as planet
Earth.

Her crash into a Blockbuster retail store is
a fine start to a journey of self-discovery in the spirit of the
1990s. She’s quickly joined by Nick Fury, the young agent played
again by Samuel L. Jackson, with a hefty layer of pixels that shave
two or three decades off his age.

He’s constant comic relief, she’s a fish out
of water, and together they adopt a 1990s dynamic amid a tsunami of
references to that decade. What with grunge attire, all-female rock
music and endless jokes about beepers and CD-ROMs and whatnot, the
plot takes its time before finally assuming a rhythm of its own. As
Carol Danvers begins to fulfill her destiny as Captain Marvel, the
character’s great potential is increasingly revealed.

Larson infuses Carol with a rugged toughness
consistent with the image of a veteran soldier whose brash
self-confidence wouldn’t put any combat pilot to shame. The process
the character undergoes, which includes learning how to listen to
her gut feelings instead of the advice of malicious men, gets
cooking on a small, exacting flame until the need for a blowup
occurs.

Larson carries it to fruition splendidly and
convincingly. Even though most of the punch lines go to the young
Fury, Danvers also has her share of comic moments, as we’ve learned
to expect from Marvel heroes. Also on hand are Carol’s old friend
Maria and her daughter, who teach her to rediscover her humanity
after she returns from space. The Skrulls provide surprises for the
movie audience too, with the emotively entertaining ways that are
particularly in evidence in their leader, played by Ben
Mendelsohn.

The directors, Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck,
who also co-wrote the script, are well aware of the immense
cultural baggage that “Captain Marvel” comes with. It’s also hard
to ignore the measure of cynicism demonstrated by the studio and
its marketing campaign, which portray the film as an important
feminist cinematic event. It’s not an accident that its release
date in the United States coincided with International Women’s
Day.

Marvel, the maker of the most successful
series in movie history, still waited 11 years and through no fewer
than 21 films before realizing that a woman could bear the weight
of a superhero picture. As “Wonder Woman” attests, the competition,
DC Films, which lags behind Marvel in every respect, was earlier in
understanding the spirit of the times.

Making a good Marvel
film

That said, “Captain Marvel” is of value as a
milestone of popular culture, not least because the superhero genre
is the most widely viewed of the century. It’s shaping an entire
generation of young people – boys and girls.

The Wonder Woman portrayed by Israel’s Gal Gadot broke the glass
ceiling, but only on the first floor. Captain Marvel, despite its
second-place finish, expands the narrow bounds of heroines in a
world of male heroes.

One particularly lovely moment, which
includes a 1990s-style montage, is genuinely moving. It’s when
Carol remembers all the times when she had fallen in her life, only
to get back up again. Such segments, mostly small but beautiful,
are interspersed throughout the film and intensify its
messages.

“Captain Marvel” trailer

At the same time, if we set aside issues
relating to representation of women and recall that this is a
big-budget film produced by Marvel Entertainment, the bottom line
isn’t really glowing. The aliens’ wars, the chase scenes in space
and the villains themselves are too much of an echo of films from
the past, including “Star Wars” and “Guardians of the Galaxy,” and
they do so in an artificial manner, as engineered as plastic.

Creating a movie that makes a statement of
both form and content at a big Hollywood studio is a challenge for
any director. Creating a Marvel Studios movie, which needs to make
reference to dozens of films from the past and future and not call
the rules of the universe into question, is far more of a
challenge.

The profitable cinema universe serves as a
movie assembly line, and the whole enterprise tends to swallow up
its directors and make them disappear. Few have managed to leave a
distinctive impression. Boden and Fleck are no exception.

“Captain Marvel,” which doesn’t depart from
the Marvel format, isn’t a bad movie, but it’s also not
extraordinary.

If I were to rank the 21 Marvel Studios
films that have been released to date, it would probably be pegged
in a reasonable position in the middle — not as low as “Thor: The
Dark World” or “Iron Man 2,” but also not even approaching “Black
Panther” and “Guardians of the Galaxy.”

Marvel fans might feel a sense of déjà vu in
watching “Captain Marvel,” but they will get their money’s worth.
And the Captain has a future. Larson’s Danvers is an intriguing
character who is imprisoned in a movie too small to accommodate her
persona. Something in the unrealized potential stirs heightened
interest ahead of her official entry into the world of the
Avengers. If they don’t stand in her way, she may yet become the
biggest star in the universe.